V. I. Lenin

Ninth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.)

March 29- April 5, 1920[1]

Delivered:16 March, 1920First Published:Published in the book—Ninth Congress of the Russian Communist Party. Verbatim Report.Moscow, 1920: Published according to the book, verified with the shorthand notesSource:Lenin’sCollected Works, 4th English Edition, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965, Volume 30, pages 439-490Translated:George HannaTranscription/HTML Markup:David Walters & Robert CymbalaCopyleft:V. I. Lenin Internet Archive (www.marx.org) 2002. Permission is granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of theGNU Free Documentation License

Opening SpeechMarch 29Report Of The Central CommitteeMarch 29Reply To The Discussion On The Report Of The Central CommitteeMarch 30Speech On Economic DevelopmentMarch 31Speech On The Co-OperativesApril 3Speech Closing The CongressApril 5Endnotes

Opening Speech

First of all allow me on behalf of the Central
    Committee of the Russian Communist Party to greet the delegates
    who have assembled for the Party Congress.

Comrades, we are opening this present Congress of the Party at
    a highly important moment. The internal development of our
    revolution has led to very big and rapid victories over the enemy
    in the Civil War, and, in view of the international situation,
    these victories, we find, are nothing more nor less than the
    victory of the Soviet revolution in the first country to make this
    revolution—a very weak and backward country—a victory
    over the combined forces of world capitalism and imperialism. And
    after these victories we may now proceed with calm and firm
    assurance to the immediate tasks of peaceful economic development,
    confident that the present Congress, having reviewed the
    experience of over two years of Soviet work, will be able to
    utilise the lesson gained in order to cope with the more difficult
    and complex task of economic development that now confronts
    us. From the international standpoint, our position has never been
    as favourable as it is now; and what fills us with particular joy
    and vigour is the news we are daily receiving from Germany, which
    shows that, however difficult and painful the birth of a socialist
    revolution may be, the proletarian Soviet power in Germany is
    spreading irresistibly. The part played by the German
    Kornilov-type putsch was similar to that of Kornilov revolt in
    Russia. After that a swing towards a workers’ government
    began, not only among the masses of urban workers, but also among
    the rural proletariat of Ger- many. And this swing is of historic
    importance. Not only is it one more absolute confirmation of the
    correctness of the line, but it gives us the assurance that the
    time is not far off when we shall be marching hand in hand with a
    German Soviet government. (Applause.)

I hereby open the Congress and request you to nominate a
    presidium.

Report Of The Central Committee

Comrades, before beginning my report I must say that, like the
    report at the preceding Congress, it is divided into two parts:
    political and organisational. This division first of all leads one
    to think of the way the work of the Central Committee has
    developed in its external aspect, the organisational aspect. Our
    Party has now been through its first year without Y. M. Sverdlov,
    and our loss was bound to tell on the whole organisation of the
    Central Committee. No one has been able to combine organisational
    and political work in one person so successfully as Comrade
    Sverdlov did and we have been obliged to attempt to replace his
    work by the work of a collegium.

During the year under review the current daily work of the
    Central Committee has been conducted by the two collegiums elected
    by the plenary meeting of the Central Committee—the
    Organising Bureau of the Central Committee and the Political
    Bureau of the Central Committee. In order to achieve co-ordination
    and consistency in the decisions of these two bodies, the
    Secretary was a member of both. In practice it has become the main
    and proper function of the Organising Bureau to distribute the
    forces of the Party, and that of the Political Bureau to deal with
    political questions. It goes without saying that this distinction
    is to a certain extent artificial; it is obvious that no policy
    can be carried out in practice without finding expression in
    appointments and transfers. Consequently, every organisational
    question assumes a political significance; and it has become the
    established practice for the request of a single member of the
    Central Committee to be sufficient to have any question, for one
    reason or another, examined as a political question. To have
    attempted to divide the functions of the Central Committee in any
    other way would hardly have been expedient and in practice would
    hardly have achieved its purpose.

This method of conducting business has produced extremely good
    results: no difficulties have arisen between the two bureaus on
    any occasion. The work of these bodies has on the whole proceeded
    harmoniously, and practical implementation has been facilitated by
    the presence of the Secretary who acted, furthermore, solely and
    exclusively in pursuance of the will of the Central Committee. It
    must be emphasised from the very outset, so as to remove all
    misunderstanding, that only the corporate decisions of the Central
    Committee adopted in the Organising Bureau or the Political
    Bureau, or by a plenary meeting of the Central
    Committee—only these decisions were carried out by the
    Secretary of the Central Committee of the Party. The work of the
    Central Committee cannot otherwise proceed properly.

After these brief remarks on the arrangement of work within the
    Central Committee, I shall get on with my job, which is the report
    of the Central Committee. To present a report on the political
    work of the Central Committee is a highly difficult task if
    understood literally. A large part of the work of the Political
    Bureau has this year consisted in making the current decision on
    the various questions of policy that have arisen, questions of
    co-ordinating the activities of all the Soviet and Party
    institutions and all organisations of the working class, of
    co-ordinating and doing their utmost to direct the work of the
    entire Soviet Republic. The Political Bureau adopted decisions on
    all questions of foreign and domestic policy. Naturally, to
    attempt to enumerate these questions, even approximately, would be
    impossible. You will find material for a general summary in the
    printed matter prepared by the Central Committee for this
    Congress. To attempt to repeat this summary in my report would be
    beyond my powers, and I do not think it would be interesting to
    the delegates. All of us who work in a Party or Soviet
    organisation keep daily track of the extraordinary succession of
    political questions, both foreign and domestic. The way these
    questions have been decided, as expressed in the decrees of the
    Soviet government, and in the activities of the Party
    organisations, at every turn, is in itself an evaluation of the
    Central Committee of the Party. It must be said that the questions
    were so numerous that they frequently had to be decided under
    conditions of extreme haste, and it was only because the members
    of the body concerned were so well acquainted with each other,
    knew every shade of opinion and had confidence in each other, that
    this work could be done at all. Otherwise it would have been
    beyond the powers of a body even three times the size. When
    deciding complex questions it frequently happened that meetings
    had to be replaced by telephone conversations. This was done in
    the full assurance that obviously complicated and disputed
    questions would not be overlooked. Now, when I am called upon to
    make a general report, instead of giving a chronological review
    and a grouping of subjects, I shall take the liberty of dwelling
    on the main and most essential points, such, moreover, as link up
    the experience of yesterday, or, more correctly, of the past year,
    with the tasks that now confront us.

The time is not yet ripe for a history of Soviet
    government. And even if it were, I must say for myself—and I
    think for the Central Committee as well—that we have no
    intention of becoming historians. What interests us is the present
    and the future. We take the past year under review as material, as
    a lesson, as a stepping-stone, from which we must proceed
    further. Regarded from this point of view, the work of the Central
    Committee falls into two big categories—work connected with
    war problems and those determining the international position of
    the Republic, and work of internal, peace-time economic
    development, which only began to come to the fore at the end of
    the last year perhaps, or the beginning of this year, when it
    became quite clear that we had won a decisive victory on the
    decisive fronts of the Civil War. Last spring our military
    situation was an extremely difficult one; as you remember, we were
    still to experience quite a number of defeats, of new, huge and
    unexpected offensives on the part of the counter-revolution and
    the Entente, none of which could have been anticipated by us. It
    was therefore only natural that the greater part of this period
    was devoted to the military problem, the problem of the Civil War,
    which seemed unsolvable to all the faint-hearted, not to speak of
    the parties of the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and
    other petty-bourgeois democrats, and to all the intermediate
    elements; this induced them to declare quite sincerely that the
    problem could not be solved, that Russia was backward and
    enfeebled and could not vanquish the capitalist system of the
    entire world, seeing that the revolution in the West had been
    delayed. And we therefore had to maintain our position and to
    declare with absolute firmness and conviction that we would win,
    we had to implement the slogans “Everything for
    victory!” and “Everything for the war!”

To carry out these slogans it was necessary to deliberately and
    openly leave some of the most essential needs unsatisfied, and
    time and again to deny assistance to many, in the conviction that
    all forces had to be concentrated on the war, and that we had to
    win the war which the Entente had forced upon us. It was only
    because of the Party’s vigilance and its strict discipline,
    because the authority of the Party united all government
    departments and institutions, because the slogans issued by the
    Central Committee were adopted by tens, hundreds, thousands and
    finally millions of people as one man, because incredible
    sacrifices were made—it was only because of all this that
    the miracle which occurred was made possible. It was only because
    of all this that we were able to win in spite of the campaigns of
    the imperialists of the Entente and of the whole world having been
    repeated twice, thrice and even four times. And, of course, we not
    only stress this aspect of the matter; we must also bear in mind
    that it teaches us that without discipline and centralisation we
    would never have accomplished this task. The incredible sacrifices
    that we have made in order to save the country from
    counter-revolution and in order to ensure the victory of the
    Russian revolution over Denikin, Yudenich and Kolchak are a
    guarantee of the world social revolution. To achieve this, we had
    to have Party discipline, the strictest centralisation and the
    absolute certainty that the untold sacrifices of tens and hundreds
    of thousands of people would help us to accomplish all these
    tasks, and that it really could be done, could be
    accomplished. And for this purpose it was essential that our Party
    and the class which is exercising the dictatorship, the working
    class, should serve as elements uniting millions upon millions of
    working people in Russia and all over the world.

If we give some thought to what, after all, was the underlying
    reason for this historical miracle, why a weak, exhausted and
    backward country was able to defeat the most powerful countries in
    the world, we shall find that it was centralisation, discipline
    and unparalleled self-sacrifice. On what basis? Millions of
    working people in a country that was anything but educated could
    achieve this organisation, discipline and centralisation only
    because the workers had passed through the school of capitalism
    and had been united by capitalism, because the proletariat in all
    the advanced countries has united—and united the more, the
    more advanced the country; and on the other hand, because
    property, capitalist property, small property under commodity
    production, disunites. Property disunites, whereas we are uniting,
    and increasingly uniting, millions of working people all over the
    world. This is now clear even to the blind, one might say, or at
    least to those who will not see. Our enemies grew more and more
    disunited as time went on. They were disunited by capitalist
    property, by private property under commodity production, whether
    they were small proprietors who profiteered by selling surplus
    grain at exorbitant prices and enriched themselves at the expense
    of the starving workers, or the capitalists of the various
    countries, even though they possessed military might and were
    creating a League of Nations, a “great united league”
    of all the foremost nations of the world. Unity of this kind is a
    sheer fiction, a sheer fraud, a sheer lie. And we have
    seen—and this was a great example—that this notorious
    League of Nations, which attempted to hand out mandates for the
    government of states, to divide up the world—that this
    notorious alliance proved to be a soap-bubble which at once burst,
    because it was an alliance founded on capitalist property. We have
    seen this on a vast historical scale, and it confirms that
    fundamental truth which told us that our cause was just, that the
    victory of the October Revolution was absolutely certain, and that
    the cause we were embarking on was one to which, despite all
    difficulties and obstacles, millions and millions of working
    people in all countries would rally. We knew that we had allies,
    that it was only necessary for the one country to which history
    had presented this honourable and most difficult task to display a
    spirit of self-sacrifice, for these incredible sacrifices to be
    repaid a hundredfold—every month we held out in our country
    would win us millions and millions of allies in all countries of
    the world.

If, after all, we give some thought to the reason we were able
    to win, were bound to win, we shall find that it was only because
    all our enemies—who were formally tied by all sorts of bonds
    to the most powerful governments and capitalists in the
    world—however united they may have been formally, actually
    turned out to be disunited. Their internal bond in fact disunited
    them, pitted them against each other. Capitalist property
    disintegrated them, transformed them from allies into savage
    beasts, so that they failed to see that Soviet Russia was
    increasing the number of her followers among the British soldiers
    who had been landed in Archangel, among the French sailors in
    Sevastopol, among the workers of all countries, of all the
    advanced countries without exception, where the
    social-compromisers took the side of capital. In the final
    analysis this was the fundamental reason, the underlying reason,
    that made our victory certain and which is still the chief,
    insuperable and inexhaustible source of our strength; and it
    permits us to affirm that when we in our country achieve the
    dictatorship of the proletariat in full measure, and the maximum
    unity of its forces, through its vanguard, its advanced party, we
    may expect the world revolution. And this in fact is an expression
    of will, an expression of the proletarian determination to fight;
    it is an expression of the proletarian determination to achieve an
    alliance of millions upon millions of workers of all
    countries.

The bourgeoisie and the pseudo-socialist gentry of the Second
    International have declared this to be mere propagandist talk. But
    it is not, it is historical reality, borne out by the bloody and
    painful experience of the Civil War in Russia. For this Civil War
    was a war against world capital; and world capital disintegrated
    of itself, devoured itself, amidst strife, whereas we, in a
    country where the proletariat was perishing from hunger and
    typhus, emerged more hardened and stronger than ever. In this
    country we won the support of increasing numbers of working
    people. What the compromisers formerly regarded as propagandist
    talk and the bourgeoisie were accustomed to sneer at, has been
    transformed in these years of our revolution, and particularly in
    the year under review, into an absolute and indisputable
    historical fact, which enables us to say with the most positive
    conviction that our having accomplished this is evidence that we
    possess a world-wide basis, immeasurably wider than was the case
    in any previous revolution. We have an international alliance, an
    alliance which has nowhere been registered, which has never been
    given formal embodiment, which from the point of view of
    “constitutional law” means nothing, but which, in the
    disintegrating capitalist world, actually means everything. Every
    month that we gained positions, or merely held out against an
    incredibly powerful enemy, proved to the whole world that we were
    right and brought us millions of new supporters.

This process has been a difficult one; it has been accompanied
      by tremendous defeats. In this very year under review the
      monstrous White terror in Finland[2]was followed by the
      defeat of the Hungarian revolution, which was stifled by the
      governments of the Entente countries that deceived their
      parliaments and concluded a secret treaty with Rumania.

It was the vilest piece of treachery, this conspiracy of the
    international Entente to crush the Hungarian revolution by means
    of a White terror, not to mention the fact that in order to
    strangle the German revolution they were ready for any
    understanding with the German compromisers,[3]and that
    these people, who had declared Liebknecht to be an honest German,
    pounced on this honest German like mad dogs together with the
    German imperialists. They exceeded all conceivable bounds; but
    every such act of suppression on their part only strengthened and
    consolidated us, while it undermined them.

And it seems to me that we must first and foremost draw a
    lesson from this fundamental experience. Here we must make a
    special point of basing our agitation and propaganda on an
    analysis, an explanation of why we were victorious, why the
    sacrifices made in the Civil War have been repaid a hundredfold,
    and how we must act, on the basis of this experience, in order to
    succeed in another war, a war on a bloodless front, a war which
    has only changed its form, but which is being waged against us by
    those same representatives, lackeys and leaders of the old
    capitalist world, only still more vigorously, still more
    furiously, still more zealously. More than any other, our
    revolution has proved the rule that the strength of a revolution,
    the vigour of its assault, its energy, determination, its victory
    and its triumph intensify the resistance of the bourgeoisie. The
    more victorious we are the more the capitalist exploiters learn to
    unite and the more determined their onslaught. For, as you all
    distinctly remember—it was not so long ago when judged by
    the passage of time, but a long time ago when judged by the march
    of events—at the beginning of the October Revolution
    Bolshevism was regarded as a freak; this view, which was a
    reflection of the feeble development and weakness of the
    proletarian revolution, very soon had to be abandoned in Russia
    and has now been abandoned in Europe as well. Bolshevism has
    become a world-wide phenomenon, the workers’ revolution has
    raised its head. The Soviet system, in creating which in October
    we followed the traditions of 1905, developing our own
    experience—this Soviet system has become a phenomenon of
    world-historic importance.

Two camps are now quite consciously facing each other all over
    the world; this may be said without the slightest exaggeration. It
    should be noted that only this year have they become locked in a
    decisive and final struggle. And now, at the time of this very
    Congress, we are passing through what is perhaps one of the
    greatest, most acute but not yet completed periods of transition
    from war to peace.

You all know what happened to the leaders of the imperialist
    powers of the Entente who loudly announced to the whole world:
    “We shall never stop fighting those usurpers, those bandits,
    those arrogators of power, those enemies of democracy, those
    Bolsheviks”—you know that first they lifted the
    blockade, that their attempt to unite the small states failed,
    because we succeeded in winning over not only the workers of all
    countries, but also the bourgeoisie of the small countries, for
    the imperialists oppress not only the workers of their own
    countries but the bourgeoisie of the small states as well. You
    know that we won over the vacil- lating bourgeoisie in the
    advanced countries. And the present position is that the Entente
    is breaking its former promises and assurances and is violating
    the treaties which, incidentally, it concluded dozens of times
    with various Russian whiteguards. And now, as far as these
    treaties are concerned, the Entente is the loser, for it
    squandered hundreds of millions on them but failed to complete the
    job.

It has now lifted the blockade and has virtually begun peace
    negotiations with the Soviet Republic. But it is not completing
    these negotiations, and therefore the small states have lost faith
    in it and in its might. So we see that the position of the
    Entente, its position in foreign affairs, defies all definition
    from the standpoint of the customary concepts of law. The states
    of the Entente are neither at peace with the Bolsheviks nor at war
    with them; they have recognised us and they have not recognised
    us. And this utter confusion among our opponents, who were so
    convinced that they represented something, proves that they
    represent nothing but a pack of capitalist beasts who have fallen
    out among themselves and are absolutely incapable of doing us any
    harm.

The position today is that Latvia has officially made peace
      proposals[4]to us. Finland has sent a telegram
      which officially speaks of a demarcation line but actually
      implies a swing to a policy of peace.[5]Lastly, Poland, the
      Poland whose representatives have been, and still are,
      sabre-rattling so vigorously, the Poland that has been, and
      still is, receiving so many trainloads of artillery and promises
      of help in everything, if only she would continue the war with
      Russia—even Poland, the unstable position of whose
      government compels her to consent to any military gamble, has
      invited us to begin negotiations for peace.[6]We
      must be extremely cautious. Our policy demands the most careful
      thought. Here it is hardest of all to find the proper policy,
      for nobody as yet knows on what track the train is standing; the
      enemy himself does not know what he is going to do next. The
      gentlemen who represent French policy and who are most zealous
      in egging Poland on, and the leaders of landowner and bourgeois
      Poland do not know what will happen next; they do not know what
      they want. Today they say, “Gentlemen, let us have a few
      trainloads of guns and a few hundred millions and we are
      prepared to fight the Bolsheviks.” They are hushing up the
      news of the strikes that are spreading in Poland; they are
      tightening up the censorship so as to conceal the truth. But the
      revolutionary movement in Poland is growing. The spread of
      revolution in Germany, in its new phase, in its new stage, now
      that the workers, after the German Kornilov-type putsch, are
      creating Red Armies, plainly shows (as can be seen from the
      recent dispatches from Germany) that the temper of the workers
      is rising more and more. The Polish bourgeoisie and landowners
      are themselves beginning to wonder whether it is not too late,
      whether there will not be a Soviet Republic in Poland before the
      government acts either for war or for peace. They do not know
      what to do. They do not know what the morrow will bring.

But we know that our forces are growing vastly every month, and
    will grow even more in future. The result is that our
    international position is now more stable than ever. But we must
    watch the international crisis with extreme care and be prepared
    for any eventuality. We have received a formal offer of peace from
    Poland. These gentlemen are in desperate straits, so desperate
    that their friends, the German monarchists, people with better
    training and more political experience and knowledge, plunged into
    a venturous gamble, a Kornilov-type putsch. The Polish bourgeoisie
    are throwing out offers of peace because they know that any
    venturous gamble may prove to be a Polish Kornilov-type
    affair. Knowing that our enemy is in desperate straits, that our
    enemy does not know what he wants to do or what he will do
    tomorrow, we must tell ourselves quite definitely that in spite of
    the peace overtures war is possible. It is impossible to foretell
    what their future conduct will be. We have seen these people
    before, we know these Kerenskys, these Mensheviks and
    Socialist-Revolutionaries. During the past two years we have seen
    them one day drawn towards Kolchak, the next day almost towards
    the Bolsheviks, and then towards Denikin—and all this
    camouflaged by talk about freedom and democracy. We know these
    gentlemen, and therefore we grasp at the proposal of peace with
    both hands and are prepared to make the maximum concessions, in
    the conviction that the conclusion of peace with the small states
    will further our cause infinitely more than war. For the
    imperialists used war to deceive the working masses, they used it
    to conceal the truth about Soviet Russia. Any peace, therefore,
    will open channels for our influence a hundred times wider, which,
    as it is, has grow n considerably in these past few years. The
    Third, Communist International has achieved unparalleled
    successes. But at the same time we know that war may be forced
    upon us any day. Our enemies do not themselves know as yet what
    they are capable of doing in this respect.

That war preparations are under way, of that there is not the
    slightest doubt. Many of the states bordering on Russia—and
    perhaps many of those not bordering on Russia—are now
    arming. That is why we must manoeuvre so flexibly in our
    international policy and adhere so firmly to the course we have
    taken, that is why we must be prepared for anything. We have waged
    the war for peace with extreme vigour. This war is yielding
    splendid results. We have made a very good showing in this sphere
    of the struggle, at any rate, not inferior to the showing made by
    the Red Army on the front where blood is being shed. But the
    conclusion of peace with us does not depend on the will of the
    small states even if they desire it. They are up to their ears in
    debt to the countries of the Entente, who are wrangling and
    competing desperately among themselves. We must therefore remember
    that peace is of course possible from the point of view of the
    world situation, the historical situation created by the Civil War
    and by the war against the Entente.

But the measures we take for peace must be accompanied by
    intensified preparedness for defence, and in no case must our army
    be disarmed. Our army offers a real guarantee that the imperialist
    powers will not make the slightest attempt or encroachment on us;
    for although they might count on certain ephemeral successes at
    first, not one of them would escape defeat at the hands of Soviet
    Russia. That we must realise, that must be made the basis of our
    agitation and propaganda, that is what we must prepare for, in
    order to solve the problem which, in view of our growing fatigue,
    compels us to combine the one with the other.

I now pass to those important considerations of principle which
    induced us to direct the working masses so resolutely along the
    lines of using the army for the solution of certain basic and
    immediate problems. The old source of discipline, capital, has
    been weakened, the old source of unity has disappeared. We must
    create a different kind of discipline, a different source of
    discipline and unity. Coercion evokes the indignation, the howls,
    the yells and outcries of the bourgeois democrats, who make great
    play of the words “freedom” and
    “equality”, but do not understand that freedom for
    capital is a crime against the working people, that equality
    between the rich and the destitute is a crime against the working
    people. In our fight against falsehood, we introduced labour
    conscription and proceeded to unite the working people, not
    hesitating to use coercion. For no revolution has ever been
    effected without coercion, and the proletariat has a right to
    exercise coercion in order to hold its own at all costs. When
    those gentry, the bourgeois, the compromisers, the German
    Independents, the Austrian Independents, and the French
    Longuetists, argued about the historical factor, they always
    forgot such a factor as the revolutionary determination, firmness
    and steadfastness of the proletariat. And that factor is precisely
    the steadfastness and firmness of the proletariat of our country,
    which declares, and has proved by its deeds, that we are prepared
    to perish to a man rather than yield our territory, rather than
    yield our principle, the principle of discipline and firm policy,
    for the sake of which everything else must be sacrificed. At the
    time when the capitalist countries and the capitalist class are
    disintegrating, at this moment of crisis and despair, this
    political factor is the only decisive one. Talk about minority and
    majority, about democracy and freedom decides nothing, however
    much the heroes of a past historical period may invoke them. It is
    the class-consciousness and firmness of the working class that
    count here. If the working class is prepared to make sacrifices,
    if it shows that it is able to strain every nerve, the problem
    will be solved. Everything must be directed to the solution of
    this problem. The determination of the working class, its
    inflexible adherence to the watchword “Death rather than
    surrender!” is not only a historical factor, it is the
    decisive, the winning factor.

We are now going over from this victory and this conviction to
    problems of peaceful economic development, the solution of which
    is the chief function of our Congress. In this respect we cannot,
    in my opinion, speak of a report of the Political Bureau of the
    Central Committee, or, rather, of a political report of the
    Central Committee. We must say frankly and bluntly that this,
    comrades, is a question which you must decide, which you must
    weigh with all your authority as the supreme Party body. We have
    laid the question before you quite clearly. We have taken up a
    definite stand. It is your duty finally to endorse, correct or
    amend our decision. But in its report the Central Committee must
    say that on this fundamental and urgent question it has adopted an
    absolutely definite stand. Yes, the thing now is to apply to the
    peaceful work of economic development, to the restoration of our
    shattered industry, everything that can weld the proletariat into
    an absolute unity. Here we need the iron discipline, the iron
    system, without which we could not have held on for two months,
    let alone over two years. We must be able to utilise our
    success. On the other hand, it must be realised that this
    transition will demand many sacrifices, of which the country has
    already made so many.

On the principle involved the Central Committee was quite
    clear. Our activities were entirely governed by this policy and
    conducted in this spirit. Take, for example, the question of
    corporate management versus individual management, which you will
    have to settle—a question which may appear to be a
    subsidiary one, and which in itself, if torn from its context,
    cannot of course claim to be a fundamental question of
    principle. This question should be examined only from the point of
    view of our basic knowledge, experience and revolutionary
    practice. For instance, we are told that “corporate
    management is one of the forms in which the masses participate in
    the work of administration”. But we on the Central Committee
    discussed this question and took our decision, which we have to
    report to you—comrades, such theoretical confusion cannot be
    tolerated. Had we permitted a tenth part of this theoretical
    confusion in the fundamental question of our military activities,
    of our Civil War, we would have been beaten, and would have
    deserved to be beaten.

Permit me, comrades, in connection with the report of the
    Central Committee and with this question of whether the new class
    should participate in the work of administration on a corporate or
    an individual basis, to introduce a little bit of theory, to point
    out how a class governs and what class domination actually
    is. After all, we are not novices in these matters, and what
    distinguishes our revolution from former revolutions is that there
    is nothing utopian about it. The new class, having replaced the
    old class, can maintain itself only by a desperate struggle
    against other classes; and it will finally triumph only if it can
    bring about the abolition of classes in general. That is what the
    vast and complex process of the class struggle demands; otherwise
    you will sink into a morass of confusion. What is class
    domination? In what way did the bourgeoisie dominate over the
    feudal lords? The Constitution spoke of freedom and equality. That
    was a lie. As long as there are working men, property-owners are
    in a position to profiteer, and indeed, as property-owners, are
    compelled to profiteer. We declare that there is no equality, that
    the well-fed man is not the equal of the hungry man, that the
    profiteer is not the equal of the working man.

How is class domination expressed today? The domination of the
    proletariat consists in the fact that the landowners and
    capitalists have been deprived of their property. The spirit and
    basic idea of all previous constitutions, even the most republican
    and democratic, amounted to one thing—property. Our
    Constitution has the right, has won itself the right, to a place
    in history by virtue of the fact that the abolition of property is
    not confined to a paper declaration. The victorious proletariat
    has abolished property, has completely annulled it—and
    therein lies its domination as a class. The prime thing is the
    question of property. As soon as the question of property was
    settled practically, the domination of the class was
    assured. When, after that, the Constitution recorded on paper what
    had been actually effected, namely, the abolition of capitalist
    and landed property, and added that under the Constitution the
    working class enjoys more rights than the peasantry, while
    exploiters have no rights whatever—that was a record of the
    fact that we had established the domination of our class, thereby
    binding to ourselves all sections and all small groups of working
    people.

The petty-bourgeois property-owners are disunited; those who
    have more property are the enemies of those who have less
    property; and the proletarians, by abolishing property, have
    declared open war on them. There are still many unenlightened and
    ignorant people who are wholly in favour of any kind of freedom of
    trade, but who cannot fight when they see the discipline and
    self-sacrifice displayed in securing victory over the exploiters;
    they are not with us, but are powerless to come out against us. It
    is only the domination of a class that determines property
    relations and which class is to be on top. Those who, as we so
    frequently observe, associate the question of the nature of class
    domination with the question of democratic centralism create such
    confusion that all successful work on this basis becomes
    impossible. Clarity in propaganda and agitation is a fundamental
    condition. When our enemies said and admitted that we had
    performed miracles in developing agitation and propaganda, that
    was not to be understood in the superficial sense that we had
    large numbers of agitators and used up large quantities of paper,
    but in the intrinsic sense that the truth contained in that
    propaganda penetrated to the minds of all; there is no escaping
    from that truth.

Whenever classes displaced each other, they changed property
    relations. When the bourgeoisie superseded the feudals, it changed
    property relations; the Constitution of the bourgeoisie says:
    “The man of property is the equal of the beggar.” That
    was bourgeois freedom. This kind of “equality” ensured
    the domination of the capitalist class in the state. But do you
    think that when the bourgeoisie superseded the feudals they
    confused the state with the administration? No, they were no such
    fools. They declared that the work of administration required
    people who knew how to administer, and that they would adapt
    feudal administrators for that purpose. And that is what they
    did. Was it a mistake? No, comrades, the art of administration
    does not descend from heaven, it is not inspired by the Holy
    Ghost. And the fact that a class is the leading class does not
    make it at once capable of administering. We have an example of
    this: while the bourgeoisie were establishing their victory they
    took for the work of administration members of another class, the
    feudal class; there was nowhere else to get them from. We must be
    sober and face the facts. The bourgeoisie had recourse to the old
    class; and we, too, are now confronted with the task of taking the
    knowledge and training of the old class, subordinating it to our
    needs, and using it all for the success of our class. We,
    therefore, say that the victorious class must be mature, and
    maturity is attested not by a document or certificate, but by
    experience and practice.

When the bourgeoisie triumphed, they did not know how to
    administer; and they made sure of their victory by proclaiming a
    new constitution and by recruiting, enlisting administrators from
    their own class and training them, utilising for this purpose
    administrators of the old class. They began to train their own new
    administrators, fitting them for the work with the help of the
    whole machinery of state; they sequestrated the feudal
    institutions and admitted only the wealthy to the schools; and in
    this way, in the course of many years and decades, they trained
    administrators from their own class. Today, in a state which is
    constructed on the pattern and in the image of the dominant class,
    we must act as every state has acted. If we do not want to be
    guilty of sheer utopianism and meaningless phrase-mongering, we
    must say that we must take into account the experience of the
    past; that we must safeguard the Constitution won by the
    revolution, but that for the work of administration, of organising
    the state, we need people who are versed in the art of
    administration, who have state and business experience, and that
    there is nowhere we can turn to for such people except the old
    class.

Opinions on corporate management are all too frequently imbued
    with a spirit of sheer ignorance, a spirit of opposition to the
    specialists. We shall never succeed with such a spirit. In order
    to succeed we must understand the history of the old bourgeois
    world in all its profundity; and in order to build communism we
    must take technology and science and make them available to wider
    circles. And we can take them only from the
    bourgeoisie—there is nowhere else to get them
    from. Prominence must be given to this fundamental question, it
    must be treated as one of the basic problems of economic
    development. We have to administer with the help of people
    belonging to the class we have overthrown; they are imbued with
    the prejudices of their class and we must re-educate them. At the
    same time we must recruit our own administrators from our own
    class. We must use the entire machinery of state to put the
    schools, adult education, and all practical training at the
    service of the proletarians, the factory workers and the labouring
    peasants, under the guidance of the Communists.

That is the only way to get things going. After our two
    years’ experience we cannot argue as though we were only
    just setting about the work of socialist construction. We
    committed follies enough in and around the Smolny period. That is
    nothing to be ashamed of. How were we to know, seeing that we were
    undertaking something absolutely new? We first tried one way, then
    another. We swam with the current, because it was impossible to
    distinguish the right from the wrong; that requires time. Now that
    is all a matter of the recent past, which we have got beyond. That
    past, in which chaos and enthusiasm prevailed, is now over. One
    document from that past is the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. It is a
    historic document—more, it was a period of history. The
    Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was forced upon us because we were
    helpless in every way. What sort of period was it? It was a period
    of impotence, from which we emerged victorious. It was a period in
    which corporate management was universal. You cannot escape that
    historical fact by declaring that corporate management is a school
    of administration. You cannot stay for ever in the preparatory
    class of a school! (Applause.) That will not do. We are
    grown-up now, and we shall be beaten and beaten again in every
    field if we behave like schoolboys. We must push forward. We must
    push higher with energy and unanimity of will. Tremendous
    difficulties face the trade unions. We must get them to regard
    this task in the spirit of the fight against the survivals of the
    celebrated democracy. All these outcries against appointees, all
    this old and dangerous rubbish which finds its way into various
    resolutions and conversations must be swept away. Otherwise we
    cannot succeed. If we have failed to master this lesson in these
    two years, we are lagging, and those who lag, get beaten.

The task is an extremely difficult one. Our trade unions have
    been of tremendous assistance in building the proletarian
    state. They were a link between the Party and the unenlightened
    millions. Let us not close our eyes to the fact that the trade
    unions bore the brunt of the struggle against all our troubles
    when the state needed help in food work. Was this not a tremendous
    task? The recent issue of theBulletin of the Central
    Statistical Boardcontains summaries by statisticians who
    certainly cannot be suspected of Bolshevism. Two interesting
    figures are given: in 1918 and 1919 the workers in the consumingguberniasreceived sevenpoodsa year, while the
    peasants in the producingguberniasconsumed seventeenpoodsa year. Before the war they used to consume sixteenpoodsa year. There you have two figures illustrating the
    relation of classes in the struggle for food. The proletariat
    continued to make sacrifices. People shout about coercion! But the
    proletariat justified and legitimatised coercion; it justified it
    by making the greatest sacrifices. The majority of the population,
    the peasants of the producingguberniasof our starving
    and impoverished Russia, for the first time had more food than
    throughout the centuries of tsarist and capitalist Russia. And we
    say that the masses will go on starving until the Red Army is
    victorious. The vanguard of the working class had to make this
    sacrifice. This struggle is a school; but when we leave this
    school we must go forward. This step must now be taken at all
    costs. Like all trade unions, the old trade unions have a history
    and a past. In the past they were organs of resistance to those
    who oppressed labour, to capitalism. But now that their class has
    become the governing class, and is being called upon to make great
    sacrifices, to starve and to perish, the situation has
    changed.

Not everybody understands this change, not everybody grasps its
    significance. And certain Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries
    who are demanding that corporate management be substituted for
    individual management have helped us in this matter. No, comrades,
    that won’t work. We have got beyond that. We are now faced
    with a very difficult task; having gained victory on the bloody
    front, we must now gain victory on the bloodless front. This war
    is a more difficult one. This front is the most arduous. We say
    this frankly to all class-conscious workers. The war which we have
    withstood at the front must be followed by a bloodless war. The
    fact is that the more we were victorious, the more regions we
    secured like Siberia, the Ukraine and the Kuban. In those regions
    there are rich peasants; there are no proletarians, and what
    proletariat there is, has been corrupted by petty-bourgeois
    habits. We know that everybody who has a piece of land in those
    parts says: “A fig for the government, I’ll get all I
    can out of the starving. A fat lot I care for the
    government.” The peasant profiteer who, when left to the
    tender mercies of Denikin, was swinging towards us will now be
    aided by the Entente. The war has changed its front and its
    forms. It is now taking the form of trade, of food profiteering,
    which it has made international. In Comrade Kamenev’s theses
    published in theBulletin of the C.C.,R.C.P.(B.)the underlying principles are stated
    fully. They want to make food profiteering international. They
    want to turn peaceful economic development into the peaceful
    disintegration of Soviet power. No you don’t, my imperialist
    gentlemen! We are on our guard. We declare: we have fought and
    won, and we shall therefore retain as our basic slogan the one
    which helped us to victory; we shall fully preserve that slogan
    and apply it to the field of labour. That slogan is the firmness
    and unity of will of the proletariat. The old prejudices, the old
    habits that still remain, must be discarded.

I should like in conclusion, to dwell on Comrade Gusev’s
    pamphlet,[7]which in my opinion deserves attention for two reasons. It is a
    good pamphlet not only from the formal standpoint, not only
    because it has been written for our Congress. Somehow, up to now
    we have all been accustomed to writing resolutions. They say that
    all literature is good except tedious literature. Resolutions, I
    take it, should he classed as tedious literature. It would be
    better if we followed Comrade Gusev’s example and wrote
    fewer resolutions and more pamphlets, even though they bristled
    with errors as his does. The pamphlet is good in spite of these
    errors, because it centres attention on a fundamental economic
    plan for the restoration of industry and production throughout the
    country, and because it subordinates everything to this
    fundamental economic plan. The Central Committee has introduced
    into the theses distributed today a whole paragraph taken entirely
    from Comrade Gusev’s theses. This fundamental economic plan
    can be worked out in greater detail with the help of experts. We
    must remember that the plan is designed for many years to come. We
    do not promise to deliver the country from hunger all at once. We
    say that the struggle will be much harder than the one on the war
    front. But it is a struggle that interests us more; it brings us
    nearer to our immediate and main tasks. It demands that maximum
    exertion of effort and that unity of will which we have displayed
    before and must display now. If we accomplish this, we shall gain
    no less a victory on the bloodless front than on the front of
    civil war. (Applause.)

Reply To The Discussion On The Report Of The Central
      Committee

Comrades, the part of the political report of the Central
    Committee which evoked chief attack was the one Comrade Sapronov
    called vituperation. Comrade Sapronov lent a very definite
    character and flavour to the position he defended; and in order to
    show you how matters actually stand, I would like to begin by
    reminding you of certain basic dates. Here I have before meBulletin of the C.C.,R.C.P.(B.)for March 2 in
    which we printed a letter from the Central Committee to
    R.C.P. organisations on the subject of the organisation of the
    Congress. And in this first letter we said: “Happily, the
    time for purely theoretical discussions, disputes over general
    questions and the adoption of resolutions on principles has
    passed. That stage is over; it was dealt with and settled
    yesterday and the day before yesterday. We must march ahead, and
    we must realise that we are now confronted by apractical
    task, thebusinesstask of rapidly overcoming
    economic chaos, and we must do it with all our strength, with
    truly revolutionary energy, and with the same devotion with which
    our finest worker and peasant comrades, the Red Army men, defeated
    Kolchak, Yudenich and Denikin.”

I must confess that I was guilty of optimism in thinking that
    the time of theoretical discussions had passed. We had theorised
    for fifteen years before the revolution, we had been administering
    the state for two years, and it was about time we displayed
    practical, business-like efficiency; and so, on March 2 we
    appealed to comrades with practical experience. In reply,
    Tomsky’s theses were published inEkonomicheskaya
    Zhiznon March 10, the theses of Comrades Sapronov, Osinsky
    and Maximovsky on March 23, and on March 27 the theses of the
    Moscow Gubernia Committee appeared—that is, all after our
    appeal to the Party. And in all the theses the question was
    treated wrongly from the theoretical standpoint. The view we
    expressed in the letter was optimistic, mistaken; it had seemed to
    us that this period had already passed, but the theses showed that
    it had not yet passed, and the comrades from the trade unions have
    no right to complain of having been treated unfairly. The question
    now is, which is right—our view, or the position advocated
    after our appeal of March 2 by all these theses? All of them
    contain a lot of practical material to which attention must be
    given. If the Central Committee did not give it serious attention,
    it would be an absolutely worthless institution.

But listen to what Comrade Tomsky says:

“§7. The basic structural principle of the regulation
      and management of industry, the only one that can ensure the
      participation of broad masses of non-party workers through the
      trade unions, is the existing principle of corporate management
      of industry, from the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council
      down to the factory managements. Only in special cases, and by
      mutual agreement between the Presidiums of the Supreme Economic
      Council and the All-Russia Central Trade Union Council, or the
      Central Committees of the trade unions concerned, should one-man
      management be permitted in certain enterprises, but only on the
      obligatory condition that control be exercised over the
      administrators by the trade unions and their bodies.

“§8. To ensure a single plan of
    economic development and co-ordination of the activities of the
    trade unions and the economic bodies, the participation of the
    trade unions in the management and regulation of industry should
    be based on the following principles: (a) general questions of
    economic policy shall be discussed by the Supreme Economic Council
    and its organs with the participation of the trade unions; (b) the
    directing economic collegiums shall be formed by the Supreme
    Economic Council and its organs in conjunction with the relevant
    trade union bodies; (c) the collegiums of economic bodies, while
    discussing general questions of the economic policy of any branch
    of production in conjunction with the trade unions and furnishing
    them with periodical reports on their activities, shall be
    regarded as organs of the Supreme Economic Council only, and shall
    be obliged to carry out the decisions only of that body, (d) all
    collegiums of economic bodies shall unreservedly carry out the
    decisions of the higher organs of the Supreme Economic Council,
    individually and corporately, and be accountable for their
    fulfilment only to the Supreme Economic Council.”

Here the most elementary theoretical questions are terribly
    muddled.

It is true that management is the job of the individual
    administrator; but who exactly that administrator will be—an
    expert or a worker—will depend on how many administrators we
    have of the old and the new type. That is elementary theory. Well,
    then, let us talk about that. But if you want to discuss the
    political line of the Central Committee, do not attribute to us
    things we did not suggest and did not say. On March 2 we appealed
    to the comrades to give us practical support, and what did we get
    in reply? From the comrades in the localities we got in reply
    things that are obviously wrong from the theoretical
    standpoint. The theses of Comrades Osinsky, Maximovsky and
    Sapronov that appeared on March 23 contain nothing but theoretical
    blunders. They say that corporate management in one form or
    another is an indispensable basis of democracy. I assert that you
    will find nothing like it in the fifteen years’
    pre-revolutionary history of the Social-Democratic
    movement. Democratic centralism means only that representatives
    from the localities get together and elect a responsible body,
    which is to do the administering. But how? That depends on how
    many suitable people, how many good administrators are
    available. Democratic centralism means that the congress
    supervises the work of the Central Committee, and can remove it
    and appoint another in its place. But if we were to go into the
    theoretical errors contained in these theses, we should never be
    done. I personally will not deal with this any more, and will only
    say that the Central Committee adopted the only line that could be
    adopted on this question. I know very well that Comrade Osinsky,
    and the others do not share the views of Makhno and Makhaisky, but
    Makhno’s followers are bound to seize upon their
    arguments. They are connected with them. Take the theses of the
    Moscow Gubernia Committee of the Party that we have been given. It
    says there that in a developed socialist society, where there will
    be no social division of labour or fixed professions, the
    periodical replacement of people performing administrative
    functions in rotation will be possible only on the basis of a
    broad corporate principle, and so on and so forth. This is a sheer
    muddle!

We appealed to the experienced people in the localities to
    help us with their practical advice. Instead, we are told that the
    Central Committee ignores the localities. What does it ignore?
    Dissertations on socialist society? There is not a trace of
    anything practical or business-like here. Of course, we have some
    splendid workers, who are borrowing a lot from the intelligentsia;
    but sometimes they borrow the worst, not the best. Then something
    has to be done about it. But if in reply to an appeal of the
    Central Committee for practical advice you bring up questions of
    principle, we have to talk about those questions. We have to say
    that errors of principle must be combated. And the theses
    published since March 2 contain preposterous errors of
    principle.

That is what I affirm. Well, let us talk about that and argue
    it out. Don’t try to evade it! It is no use claiming that
    you are not theoreticians. Pardon me, Comrade Sapronov, your
    theses are the theses of a theoretician. You would see if they
    were put into practice that you would have to turn back and settle
    questions in an unbusiness-like manner. Anybody who tried to take
    the theses of Comrades Maximovsky, Sapronov and Tomsky as
    practical guidance, would be profoundly mistaken; they are
    fundamentally wrong. I consider that their idea of the attitude of
    the class to the structure of the state is fundamentally wrong and
    would drag us back. Naturally, it is backed by all the elements
    who are lagging behind and have not yet got beyond all this. And
    the authors of these theses are to be blamed not for deliberately
    advocating inefficiency, but for their theoretical mistake on the
    question the Central Committee asked them to discuss; a mistake
    which in a way provides a banner, a justification, for the worst
    elements. And why? From want of thought. Authentic documents prove
    this beyond all doubt.

I now pass to the accusation made by Comrade Yurenev in
    connection with Comrade Shlyapnikov. If the Central Committee had
    removed Comrade Shlyapnikov, as a representative of the
    opposition, just before the Congress, that certainly would have
    been infamous. When we had established that Comrade Shlyapnikov
    was leaving, we said in the Political Bureau that we were not
    giving him any instructions before his departure; and on the eve
    of his departure Comrade Shlyapnikov came to me and said that he
    was not going on the instructions of the Central Committee. And so
    Comrade Yurenev simply heard a rumour and is now spreading
    it. (Yurenev: “Shlyapnikov told me so
    himself. . . .”)

I do not know how he could have told you so himself, seeing
    that he came to me before he left and said that he was not going
    on the instructions of the Central Committee. Yes, of course, if
    the Central Committee had banished the opposition before the
    Congress that would have been an unpardonable thing. But, in
    general, when there is talk about banishing people, I say:
    “Well, then, just try to elect a Central Committee which
    could distribute forces properly without giving any cause for
    complaint.” How can forces be distributed so that everybody
    is satisfied? If forces are not distributed, how can you talk
    about centralism? And if there were distortions of principles, let
    us have instances. If you say that we banished representatives of
    the opposition, give us an instance, and we shall examine it, for
    there may have been mistakes. Perhaps Comrade Yurenev, who
    complained to the Political Bureau of having been wrongfully
    withdrawn from the Western Front—perhaps he was banished?
    The Political Bureau examined the matter and found it correct. And
    whatever Central Committee you elected, it would have to
    distribute its forces.

Further, as regards the division of business between the
    Organising Bureau and the Political Bureau. Comrade Maximovsky is
    more experienced in matters of organisation than I am, and he says
    that Lenin is mixing Organising Bureau and Political Bureau
    questions. Well, let us see. In our opinion, the Organising Bureau
    should distribute forces and the Political Bureau deal with
    policy. If such a division is wrong, how are the functions of
    these two bodies to be divided? Do you want us to write a
    constitution? It is difficult to draw a hard and fast line between
    the Political Bureau and the Organising Bureau, to delimit their
    functions precisely. Any question may become a political one, even
    the appointment of the superintendent of a building. If anyone has
    any other solution to suggest, please let us have it. Comrades
    Sapronov, Maximovsky and Yurenev, let us have your proposals; just
    try to divide, to delimit the Organising Bureau and the Political
    Bureau. As we have it, the protest of a single member of the
    Central Committee is enough for us to treat the question as a
    political one. Yet in all this time there has not been a single
    protest. Independence is not hampered in any way: any member of
    the Central Committee may declare a question to be a political
    one. And anybody who has any practical experience in organisation,
    even if he is not as competent as Comrade Maximovsky, even if he
    has worked in this field only six months, ought to have made a
    different sort of criticism from the one Comrade Maximovsky
    made. Let the critics make definite recommendations. We shall
    accept them, and advise the election of a new Central Committee,
    which will carry out these recommendations. But all we have had is
    abstract criticism and false assertions.

Let us suppose you keep the Organising Bureau away from
    political leadership. What, then, I ask, will political leadership
    amount to? Who does the leading, if not people? And how can you
    lead except by distributing forces? How can you compel a man to
    carry out instructions if he is incompetent? He is given certain
    instructions, his work is checked, and finally he is put on
    another job. What more must we do to bring this home to Comrades
    Maximovsky, Sapronov and Osinsky, who in their theses propose a
    theoretical amendment that was rejected long ago? What they are
    doing in practice is even worse, and they are making it quite
    clear that they have no material for serious criticism.

I heard one practical point in Comrade Sapronov’s speech
    and jumped at it. Comrade Sapronov said: “The Seventh
    Congress of Soviets gave a ruling, and we are violating it; the
    decree on requisitioning flax is an infringement of the decision
    of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee.” I cannot
    remember even a tenth of the decrees we pass. But I made inquiries
    in the Secretariat of the Council of People’s Commissars
    about the regulations governing flax procurements. The decree was
    passed on February 10. And what has happened? There is not a
    comrade, whether on the Political Bureau or on the All-Russia
    Central Executive Committee, who is opposed to independent
    initiative. We haveseen them all here on this platform. Comrades
    know that they can speak for themselves. Why did they not appeal
    against this decision? Let us have your complaints! There was no
    such complaint after February 10. After a long fight, we adopted
    this decision, which was proposed by Comrade Rykov and agreed to
    by Comrade Sereda and the People’s Commissariat of
    Food. “You have made a mistake!” we are told. Perhaps
    we have. Correct us. Submit this question to the Political
    Bureau. That will be a formal decision. Let us have the
    minutes. If they show that we have violated a decision of the
    Congress, we ought to be put on trial. Where is the charge? On the
    one hand, they reproach us on account of Shlyapnikov; on the
    other, they say that the flax business was a violation of a
    decision. Be good enough to bring facts to show that we violated
    the decision. But you do not bring any facts. All your words are
    mere words: initiative, appointments, and so on. Why then have
    centralism? Could we have held out for even two months if we had
    made no appointments during this period, during these two years
    when in various places we passed from complete exhaustion and
    disruption to victory again? Just because you are displeased with
    the recall of Comrade Shlyapnikov or Comrade Yurenev, you fling
    these words among the crowd, among the unenlightened
    masses. Comrade Lutovinov says that the question has not been
    settled. It will have to be settled. If two people’s
    commissars differ in their opinion of Ivan Ivanovich, and one says
    that a question of policy is involved, what is to be done? What
    method do you propose? Do you think that it is only in the
    Presidium of the All-Russia Central Executive Committee that
    tedious questions arise? Let me tell you that there is not a
    single institution where tedious questions do not arise, and we
    all have to deal with questions of Maria Ivanovna and Sidor
    Ivanovich. But you cannot say that no politics are involved here,
    for politics fill all minds. Comrade Lutovinov had—I do not
    know how to put it; I fear to offend Comrade Sapronov’s
    delicate ear and I shrink from using a polemical
    expression—but he said that Comrade Krestinsky threatened to
    bring about a split. A meeting of the Bureau was held on the
    subject. We have the minutes of the Bureau, and I would ask all
    the Congress delegates to take these minutes and read them. We
    came to the conclusion that Comrade Krestinsky was hot-headed and
    that you, Comrade Lutovinov and Comrade Tomsky, had raised a very
    malodorous scandal. Perhaps we were wrong—then correct our
    decision; but it is preposterous to say what you said, without
    having read the documents and without mentioning that there was a
    special meeting and that the matter was investigated in the
    presence of Tomsky and Lutovinov.

There are two other points I still have to deal with. First,
    the appointment of Comrades Bukharin and Radek. It is said that we
    sent them to the All-Russia Central Trade Union Council as
    political commissars, and the attempt is being made here to
    represent this as a violation of independence, as
    bureaucracy. Perhaps you know better theoreticians than Radek and
    Bukharin. Then by all means let us have them. Perhaps you know
    people better acquainted with the trade union movement. Let us
    have them. Do you mean to say that the Central Committee has no
    right to reinforce a trade union with people who have the best
    theoretical knowledge of the trade union movement, who are
    acquainted with the experience of the Germans, and who can
    counteract an incorrect line? A Central Committee which did not do
    that could not be a directing body. The more we are surrounded by
    peasants and Kuban Cossacks the more difficulties we have with the
    proletarian dictatorship. Therefore the line must be straightened
    out at all costs and made as hard as steel, and this is the line
    we recommend to the Party Congress.

Comrade Bubnov told us here that he has close connections with
    the Ukraine and thereby betrayed the true character of his
    objections. He said that the Central Committee is responsible for
    the growing strength of theBorotbaParty. This is a very
    complex and important issue, and I think in this important issue,
    which demanded manoeuvring, and very complex manoeuvring at that,
    we emerged victorious. When we said in the Central Committee that
    the maximum concessions should be made to the Borotbists, we were
    laughed at and told that we were not following a straight
    line. But you can fight in a straight line when the enemy’s
    line is straight. But when the enemy moves in zigzags, and not in
    a straight line, we have to follow him and catch him at every
    turn. We promised the maximum concessions to the Borotbists, but
    on condition that they pursued a communist policy. In this way we
    showed that we are in no way intolerant. And that these
    concessions were made quite rightly is shown by the fact that all
    the best elements among the Borotbists have now joined our
    Party. We have carried out a re-registration of this party, and
    instead of a revolt of the Borotbists, which seemed inevitable, we
    find that, thanks to the correct policy of the Central Committee,
    which was carried out so splendidly by Comrade Rakovsky, all the
    best elements among the Borotbists have joined our Party under our
    control and with our recognition, while all the rest have
    disappeared from the political scene. This victory was worth a
    couple of good tussles. So anybody who says that the Central
    Committee is guilty of strengthening the Borotbists does not
    understand the political line on the national question.

I shall just touch on the speech of the last comrade, who said
    that everything in the programme about the trade unions should be
    deleted. There you have an example of hastiness. We don’t do
    things so simply. We say that nothing should be deleted, that the
    question should be discussed in pamphlets, articles in the press,
    and so on. The trade unions are heading for the time when they
    will take economic life, namely industry, into their hands. The
    talk about not admitting bourgeois specialists into the trade
    unions is a prejudice. The trade unions are educational bodies,
    and strict demands must be made on them. The Central Committee
    will not tolerate bad educators. Education is a long and difficult
    business. A decree is not enough here; patient and skilful
    handling is required. And that is what we are aiming at and will
    continue to aim at. It is a matter in which we must be cautious
    but firm.

Speech On Economic Development

Comrades, first two brief remarks. Comrade Sapronov continued
    to accuse me of forgetfulness, but the question he raised he left
    unexplained. He continued to assure us that the flax
    requisitioning decree is a violation of the decision of the
    All-Russia Central Executive Committee. I maintain that you cannot
    hurl unsupported accusations, very serious accusations, at a Party
    Congress in that way. Of course, if the Council of People’s
    Commissars has violated a decision of the All-Russia Central
    Executive Committee it should be put on trial. But how is it that
    from February 10 to this day no complaint has been received that
    this decree is a violation? All we get is an absolutely
    unsupported accusation of the sort that are handed out easily
    enough, but such methods of fighting are not to be taken
    seriously.

Comrade Milyutin says that there are practically no points of
    difference between us, and that therefore it looks as if Lenin
    opposes squabbling and himself provokes this squabble. But Comrade
    Milyutin is distorting things somewhat, which he ought not to
    do. The first draft of the resolution, compiled by Comrade
    Trotsky, was then edited corporately in the Central Committee. We
    sent this draft to Comrades Milyutin and Rykov. They returned it
    with the statement that they would give battle on it. This is what
    actually happened. After we had developed agitation and obtained
    allies, they organised an all-round opposition at the Congress;
    and it was only when they saw that nothing would come of it that
    they began to say they were almost in agreement. That is so, of
    course; but you must carry it through to the end and admit that
    your agreement means that you failed completely after the
    opposition came forward here and tried to consolidate itself on
    the issue of corporate management. Only after Comrade Milyutin had
    spoken for fifteen minutes, and his time was up, did it occur to
    him that it would be well to put the matter on a practical
    footing. He was quite right there. But I am afraid it is too late:
    although Comrade Rykov has still to close the discussion, the
    opposition cannot be saved. If the advocates of corporate
    management had during the past two months practised what they
    preached, if they had given us even a single example—not by
    saying there is a certain director and an assistant, but by an
    inquiry promoting a detailed investigation of the problem,
    comparing corporate management with individual management as was
    decided by the Congress of Economic Councils and by the Central
    Committee—we would have been much the wiser; at the Congress
    we would then have had something more than not very relevant
    discussions of principle, and the advocates of corporate
    management might have furthered matters. Their position would have
    been a strong one if they could have produced even ten factories
    with similar conditions managed on the corporate principle and
    compared them in a practical manner with the state of affairs in
    factories with similar conditions, but managed on the individual
    principle. We could have allowed any speaker an hour for such a
    report, and he would have furthered matters considerably. We might
    perhaps have established practical gradations in this question of
    corporate management. But the whole point is that none of them,
    neither the Economic Council members nor the trade unionists, who
    should have had practical data at their disposal, gave us
    anything, because they had nothing to give. They have nothing,
    absolutely nothing!

Comrade Rykov objected here that I want to remake the French
    Revolution, that I deny that the bourgeoisie grew up within the
    feudal system. That is not what I said. What I said was that when
    the bourgeoisie replaced the feudal system they took the feudal
    lords and learned from them how to administer; and this in no way
    contradicts the fact that the bourgeoisie grew up within the
    feudal system. And as for my thesis that, after it has seized
    power, the working class begins to put its principles into effect,
    nobody, absolutely nobody, has refuted it. After it has seized
    power, the working class maintains it, preserves it and
    consolidates it as every other class does, namely, by a change of
    property relations and by a new constitution. That is my first and
    fundamental thesis; and it is incontrovertible. My second thesis
    that every new class learns from its predecessor and takes over
    administrators from the old class, is also an absolute truth. And,
    lastly, my third thesis is that the working class must increase
    the number of administrators from its own ranks, establish
    schools, and train executives on a nation-wide scale. These three
    theses are indisputable, and they fundamentally contradict the
    theses of the trade unions.

At the meeting of the group, when we examined their theses,
    and when Comrade Bukharin and I were defeated,[8]I told
    Comrade Tomsky that article 7 in the theses is the result of
    complete theoretical confusion. It says:

“The basic structural principle of the regulation and
      management of industry, the only one that can ensure the
      participation of broad masses of non-party workers through the
      trade unions, is the existing principle of corporate management
      of industry, from the Presidium of the Supreme Economic Council
      down to the factory managements. Only in special cases, and by
      mutual agreement between the Presidiums of the Supreme Economic
      Council and the All-Russia Central Trade Union Council, or the
      Central Committees of the trade unions concerned should one-man
      management be permitted in certain enterprises but only on the
      obligatory condition that control be exercised over the
      administrators by the trade unions and their bodies.”

This is sheer nonsense, because everything—the role of
    the working class in winning state power, the interrelation of
    methods—everything is muddled! Such things cannot be
    tolerated. Such things drag us back theoretically. The same must
    be said of the democratic centralism of Comrades Sapronov,
    Maximovsky and Osinsky. Comrade Osinsky forgets that when he comes
    forward and claims that I call democratic centralism nonsense. You
    cannot distort things in that way! What has the question of
    appointments, of endorsement by local organisations, got to do
    with it? You can have things endorsed by collegiums and you can
    also appoint collegiums. That has nothing to do with the
    case. They say that democratic centralism consists not only in the
    All-Russia Central Executive Committee ruling; but in the
    All-Russia Central Executive Committee ruling through the local
    organisations. What has corporate management or individual
    management got to do with it?

Comrade Trotsky recalled his report made in 1918 and, reading
    the speech he then made, pointed out that at that time not only
    did we argue about fundamental questions but a definite decision
    was taken by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee. I dug up
    my old pamphletThe Immediate
    Tasks of the Soviet Government, which I had completely
    forgotten, and find that the question of individual management was
    not only raised but even approved in the theses of the All-Russia
    Central Executive Committee. We work in such a way that we forget
    not only what we ourselves have written but even what has been
    decided by the All-Russia Central Executive Committee, and
    subsequently dig up these decisions. Here are some passages from
    this pamphlet.

“Those who deliberately (although most of
    them probably do not realise it) promote petty-bourgeois laxity
    would like to see in this granting of ‘unlimited’
    (i.e., dictatorial) powers to individuals a departure from the
    collegiate principle, from democracy and from the principles of
    Soviet government. Here and there, among Left
    Socialist-Revolutionaries, a positively hooligan agitation, i.e.,
    agitation appealing to the base instincts and to the small
    proprietor’s urge to ‘grab all he can’, has been
    developed against the dictatorship decree. . . .[9]

“Large-scale machine industry—which
    is precisely the material source, the productive source, the
    foundation of socialism—calls for absolute and strictunity of will, which directs the joint labours of
    hundreds, thousands and tens of thousands of people. The
    technical, economic and historical necessity of this is obvious,
    and all those who have thought about socialism have always
    regarded it as one of the conditions of socialism”
    . . . this is the only way in which “strict unity of will
    can be ensured. . . .

“But be that as it may,unquestioning
    subordinationto a single will is absolutely necessary for
    the success of processes organised on the pattern of large-scale
    machine industry. On the railways it is twice and three times as
    necessary. . . .

“And our whole task, the task of the
    Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which is the class-conscious vehicle
    of the strivings of the exploited for emancipation, is to
    appreciate this change, to understand that it is necessary, to
    stand at the head of the exhausted people who are wearily seeking
    a way out and lead them along the true path, along the path of
    labour discipline, along the path of co-ordinating the task of
    arguing at mass meetingsaboutthe conditions of work
    with the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet
    leader, of the dictator,duringthe work. . . .

“It required precisely the October victory
    of the working people over the exploiters, it required a whole
    historical period in which the working people themselves could
    first of all discuss the new conditions of life and the new tasks,
    in order to make possible the durable transition to superior forms
    of labour discipline, to the conscious appreciation of the
    necessity for the dictatorship of the proletariat, to
    unquestioning obedience to the orders of individual
    representatives of the Soviet government during the
    work. . . .

“We must learn to combine the ‘public
    meeting’ democracy of the working people—turbulent,
    surging, overflowing its banks like a spring nood withirondiscipline while at work, withunquestioning
    obedienceto the will of a single person, the Soviet leader,
    while at work.”

On April 29, 1918, the All-Russia Central Executive Committee
    adopted a resolution fully endorsing the basic propositions set
    forth in this report and instructed its Presidium to recast them
    as theses representing the principal tasks of the Soviet
    government. We are thus reiterating what was approved two years
    ago in an official resolution of the All-Russia Central Executive
    Committee! And we are now being dragged back on a matter that was
    decided long ago, a matter which the All-Russia Central Executive
    Committee endorsed and explained, namely, that Soviet socialist
    democracy and individual management and dictatorship are in no way
    contradictory, and that the will of a class may sometimes be
    carried out by a dictator, who sometimes does more alone and is
    frequently more necessary. At any rate, the attitude towards the
    principles of corporate management and individual management was
    not only explained long ago, but was even endorsed by the
    All-Russia Central Executive Committee. In this connection our
    Congress is an illustration of the sad truth that instead of
    advancing from the explanation of questions of principle to
    concrete questions, we are advancing backward. Unless we get away
    from this mistake we shall never solve the economic problem.

I should also like to say a few words about certain remarks of
    Comrade Rykov’s. He asserts that the Council of
    People’s Commissars is putting obstacles in the way of the
    amalgamation of the commissariats running the economy. And when
    Comrade Rykov is told that he wants to swallow up Comrade
    Tsyurupa, he replies, “I don’t care if it is Tsyurupa
    that swallows me up, as long as the economic commissariats are
    amalgamated.” I know where this leads, and I must say that
    the attempt of the Supreme Economic Council to form a sort of
    separate bloc of the economic commissariats, separate from the
    Council of Defence and the Council of People’s Commissars,
    did not pass unnoticed by the Central Committee, and met with
    disfavour. The Council of Defence has now been renamed the Council
    of Labour and Defence. You want to separate yourselves from the
    Commissariat of the Army, which is giving its best forces to the
    war and is an institution without which you cannot even carry out
    labour conscription. And we cannot carry out labour conscription
    without the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs
    either. Take the post office; we cannot send a letter without the
    Commissariat of Posts and Telegraphs. Take the People’s
    Commissariat of Health. How will you conduct the economy if
    seventy per cent are down with typhus? What it amounts to is that
    every matter must be co-ordinated and referred to an economic
    commissariat. Is not such a plan absolutely absurd? Comrade Rykov
    had no serious argument. That is why it was opposed and the
    Central Committee did not support it.

Further, Comrade Rykov joked about a bloc with Comrade
    Holtzmann, which Comrade Trotsky seems to be forming. I should
    like to say a few words on this. A bloc is always needed between
    Party groups that are in the right. That should always be regarded
    as an essential condition for a correct policy. If Comrade
    Holtzmann, whom, I regret to say, I know very little, but of whom
    I have heard as a representative of a certain trend among the
    metalworkers, a trend that particularly insists on sensible
    methods—which I stress in my theses, too—if it, is on
    these grounds that he insists on individual management, that, of
    course, can only be extremely useful. A bloc with this trend would
    be an exceedingly good thing. If the representation of the trade
    unions on the Central Committee is to be increased, it would be
    useful to have on it representatives of this trend
    too—though it may be wrong on certain points, it is at least
    original and has a definite shade of opinion of its own—side
    by side with the extremist champions of corporate management who
    are battling in the name of democracy but who are mistaken. Let
    them both be represented on the Central Committee—and you
    will have a bloc. Let the Central Committee be so constituted
    that, with the help of a bloc, a field of operation may be found
    that functions all the year round, and not only during the week a
    Party Congress is held. We have always rejected the principle of
    regional representation, because it leads to a lot of regional
    cliquism. When it is a question of closer fusion with the trade
    unions, of being alive to every shade of opinion in the trade
    unions, of maintaining contacts—it is essential for the
    Central Committee to be constituted in such a way as to have a
    transmission belt to the broad masses of the trade unions (we have
    600,000 Party members and 3,000,000 trade union members) to
    connect the Central Committee simultaneously with the united will
    of the 600,000 Party members and the 3,000,000 trade union
    members. We cannot govern without such a transmission belt. The
    more we won back of Siberia, the Kuban area and the Ukraine, with
    their peasant population, the more difficult the problem became,
    and the more laboriously the machine revolved, because in Siberia
    the proletariat is numerically small, and it is weaker in the
    Ukraine too. But we know that the Donets Basin and Nikolayev
    workers have bluntly refused to defend the semi-demagogic
    corporate principle into which Comrade Sapronov has lapsed. There
    can be no question but that the proletarian element in the Ukraine
    differs from the proletarian element in Petrograd, Moscow and
    Ivanovo Voznesensk—not because it is no good, but for purely
    historical reasons. They did not have occasion to become, so
    steeled by hunger, cold and strife as the proletarians of Moscow
    and Petrograd. We therefore need such a bond with the trade
    unions, such a form of organisation of the Central Committee, as
    would enable it to know every shade of opinion, not only among the
    600,000 Party members, but also among the 3,000,000 trade union
    members, so that it may be able at any moment to lead them all as
    one man! Such an organisation is essential. That is the basic
    factor, the political factor without which the dictatorship of the
    proletariat will not be a dictatorship. If we are to have a bloc,
    let it be a real bloc! We should not be afraid of it, but should
    welcome it and practise it more vigorously and more extensively
    right in the central institutions of the Party.

Speech On The Co-Operatives[10]

It was only last night and today that I have had an opportunity
    of partially acquainting myself with the two resolutions. I think
    that the resolution of the minority of the commission is the more
    correct. Comrade Milyutin attacked it with a great battery of
    terrifying words: he discovered half measures in it, even
    quarter-measures; he accused it of opportunism. But it seems to me
    that the devil is not as black as he is painted. If you get down
    to the root of the matter you will see that Comrade Milyutin, who
    tried to give the matter a basis in principle, showed by his own
    arguments that the resolution he advocated was incorrect and
    unsuitable specifically from the standpoint of practice and of
    Marxism. It is incorrect for the following reasons; Milyutin
    stated that his resolution, the resolution of the majority of the
    commission, advocated fusion with the volost executive committees,
    subordination to the volost executive committees, and that is why
    he sees in his resolution directness and decisiveness as compared
    with the insufficiently revolutionary character of the minority
    resolution. During the long course of our revolutionary campaign
    we have seen that whenever we made proper preparations for our
    revolutionary actions they were crowned with success; but that
    when they were merely imbued with revolutionary fervour they ended
    in failure.

What does the resolution of the minority of the commission say?
    The resolution of the minority says: direct your attention to
    intensifying communist work in the consumers’ societies and
    to securing a majority within them; first make ready the organs to
    which you want to hand them over, then you can hand them
    over. Compare this with the line pursued by Milyutin. He says: the
    co-operatives are no good, therefore hand them over to the volost
    executive committees. But have you a communist basis in the
    co-operatives you want to hand over? The essence of the
    matter—preparation—is ignored; only the ultimate
    slogan is given. If this communist work has been done, and organs
    have been set up to take them over and guide them, the transfer is
    quite natural, and there is no need to proclaim it at a Party
    congress. But have you not been threatening the peasants enough?
    Has not the Supreme Economic Council shaken its fist enough at the
    peasants and the co-operatives in the matter of the flax
    procurement? If you recall the practical experience of our work in
    the localities and in the Council of People’s Commissars,
    you will admit that this is a wrong attitude to take, and that the
    right resolution is the one which declares that the work of
    communist education and the training of executives are necessary,
    for otherwise the transfer will be impossible.

The second question of cardinal importance is that of contacts
    with the consumers’ co-operatives. Here Comrade Milyutin
    says something utterly inconsistent. If the consumers’
    co-operatives are not fulfilling all their assignments—which
    is what we have been saying for two years in a number of decrees
    directed against the kulaks—it must be remembered that
    government measures against the kulaks can also be applied against
    the co-operative societies. And this is being done in full. The
    most important thing at the moment is to increase production and
    the quantity of goods. If the consumers’ co-operatives do
    not get this done, they will be punished for it. But if, owing to
    their connection with the producers’ co-operatives, they
    give even a small increase of products, we must welcome it and
    foster the initiative. If the consumers’ co-operatives, in
    spite of their closer, intimate local connections with production,
    do not show an increase, it will mean that they have not fulfilled
    the direct assignment of the Soviet government. If there are even
    two or three energetic comrades in a district who are prepared to
    combat the kulaks and the bourgeoisie, victory is assured. In what
    way was Comrade Chuchin’s initiative thwarted? He did not
    cite a single instance. But the idea that we must link up the
    producers’ co-operatives with the consumers’
    cooperatives and agree to any concession that may increase the
    amount of products in the near future follows logically from our
    experience of the past two years. It in no way hampers either
    communist functionaries or Soviet officials in their war on the
    kulak co-operative, the bourgeois type of co-operative. Far from
    hampering them, it provides them with a new weapon. If you succeed
    in organising anything at all we shall give you a bonus; but if
    you do not fulfil this assignment we shall punish you, not only
    because you are counter-revolutionary-we have the Cheka for that,
    as was rightly pointed out here-no, we shall punish you for not
    fulfilling the assignment of the state, of the Soviet government
    and the proletariat.

Comrade Milyutin has not produced a single sound argument
    against amalgamating the consumers’ co-operativesall ho said
    was that this seemed to him to be opportunism or a
    half-measure. This is strange coming from Comrade Milyutin, who,
    with Comrade Rykov, was prepared to make big strides, hut
    discovered that lie cannot even make a tenth of one stride. From
    this aspect, connections with the consumers’ cooperatives
    will ho an advantage; they will make it possible to tackle
    production immediately. All means are available to prevent
    interference in political matters; and as to obedience in the
    production and economic sphere, that depends entirely on the
    People’s Commissariat of Agriculture and the Supreme
    Economic Council. These means are adequate for you to be able to
    control the co-operatives.

I now come to the third question, the question of
    nationalisation, which Milyu tin advocated in a way that was
    strange to hear. A commission was set up. Comrade K restinsky was
    in a minority on the commission and Comrade Mi. lyutin was the
    victor. But now he says: "On the question of nationalisation I am
    prepared not to argue." Then what was the commission arguing
    about? If your standpoint is the same as Comrade Chuchin’s
    you are wrong in renouncing nationalisation. It has been asked
    here why, if the capitalists have been nationalised, the kulaks
    cannot be nationalised too. It is not surprising that this
    argument evoked hilarity. For however you count the well-to-do
    peasants, those who exploit the labour of others, you will find
    there are no less than half a million, perhaps even something like
    a million. How do you propose to nationalise them? It is
    fantastic. We have not the means for that as yet.

Comrade Chuchin is quite right when he says that there are a
    lot of counter-revolutionaries in the co-operatives. But that is a
    horse of another colour. What was said about the Cheka was quite
    in place here. If you are too shortsighted to expose individual
    leaders of the co-operatives, then just install one Communist to
    detect the counter-revolution; if he is a good Communist—and
    a good Communist has the qualities of a good member of the
    Cheka—he should, when assigned to a consumers’
    society, bag at least two counter-revolutionary co-operators.

That is why Comrade Chuchin is wrong when he advocates
    immediate nationalisation. It would be a good thing, but it is
    impossible, for we are dealing with a class which is least
    susceptible to our influence and which certainly cannot be
    nationalised. We have not even nationalised all the industrial
    enterprises. By the time an order of the chief administrations and
    central boards reaches the localities it becomes absolutely
    ineffective; it is completely lost in a sea of documents, because
    of lack of roads and telegraph, etc. It is therefore impossible to
    speak of the nationalisation of the co-operatives as yet. Comrade
    Milyutin is wrong in principle too. He feels that his position is
    weak and thinks that he can simply withdraw this point. But in
    that case, Comrade Milyutin, you are undermining your own
    resolution, you are issuing a certificate to the effect that the
    resalution of the minority is right; for the spirit of your
    resolution—to subordinate them to the volost executive
    committees (that is exactly what is said ill the first
    clause—"take measures")is a Cheka spirit, wrongly introduced
    into an economic issue. The other resolution says that the first
    thing to do is to increase the number of Communists, to intensify
    communist propaganda and agitation-that a basis must be
    created. There is nothing grandiloquent here, no immediate
    promises of a land flowing with milk and honey. But if there are
    Communists in the localities, they will know what has to be done,
    and there will be no need for Comrade Chillchin to explain where
    counter-revolutionaries should be taken to. Secondly, an organ
    must be created. Create an
      organ and test it in action, check whether production is
    increasing-that is what the resolution of the minority says. First
    of all create a basis, and then-then we shall see. What has to be
    done will follow from this of itself. We have enough decrees
    saying that counter-revolutionaries should he handed over to the
    Choke, and if there is no Cheka, to the Revolutionary
    Committee. We need less of this fist-shaking. We must adopt the
    resolution of the minority, which lays down a basic line of
    policy.

Speech Closing The Congress

Comrades, in making a brief summary of the work of our Congress
    we must, in my opinion, first of all dwell upon the tasks of our
    Party. The Congress has adopted a detailed resolution on the
    question of organisation, and as might have been expected, a very
    important place in that resolution is occupied by the question of
    the education, the training, the organisational deployment of the
    members of our Party. The Credentials Committee has reported that
    over 600,000 members of our Party are represented at this
    Congress. We are all fully aware of the tremendous difficulties
    the Party has had to cope with in these strenuous times, when
    measures had to be taken to prevent the worst elements, the offal
    of the old capitalist system, from seeping into the government
    party, from fastening themselves on to it—it is naturally an
    open party, for it is the government party, and as such opens the
    way to power. One of these measures was the institution of Party
    Weeks. Under such conditions, at such moments, when the Party and
    the movement were in exceptionally trying situations, when Denikin
    stood north of Orel, and Yudenich within fifty versts of
    Petrograd, it was only people who were sincerely devoted to the
    cause of the emancipation of the working people who could have
    joined the Party.

Such conditions will not occur again, at least not in the near
    future, and it must be said that the huge membership (as compared
    with previous congresses) our Party has attained gives rise to a
    certain apprehension. And there is one very real danger, which is
    that the rapid growth of our Party has not always been
    commensurate with the extent to which we have educated this mass
    of people for the performance of the tasks of the moment. We must
    always bear in mind that this army of 600,000 must be the vanguard
    of the working class, and that we should scarcely have been able
    to carry out our tasks during these two years if it had not been
    for iron discipline. The basic condition for the maintenance and
    continuance of strict discipline is loyalty; all the old means and
    sources of discipline have ceased to exist, and we base our
    activities solely on a high degree of understanding and political
    consciousness. This has enabled us to achieve a discipline which
    is superior to that of any other state and which rests on a basis
    different from that of the discipline which is being maintained
    with difficulty, if it can be maintained at all, in capitalist
    society. We must therefore remember that our task in the coming
    year, after the brilliant successes achieved in the war, is not so
    much the growth of the Party as work inside the Party, the
    education of the membership of our Party. It is not for nothing
    that our resolutions on organisation devote as much space as
    possible to this question.

We must spare no effort to make this vanguard of the
    proletariat, this army of 600,000 members, capable of coping with
    the tasks that confront it. And it is confronted by tasks of
    gigantic international and internal importance. As to the
    international tasks, our international position has never been as
    good as it is now. News about the life of the workers abroad
    seldom reaches us, yet every time you receive a couple of letters
    or a few issues of European or American working-class socialist
    newspapers you experience real pleasure, because everywhere, in
    all parts of the world, you see among masses formerly entirely
    untouched by propaganda, or steeped in wretched opportunism, in
    purely parliamentary socialism, a tremendous growth of interest in
    the Soviet power, in the new tasks, a growth much greater than we
    imagine; everywhere you see intense revolutionary movement,
    ferment, and revolution has become a current issue.

I had occasion yesterday to glance through an issue of the
    newspaper of the British Socialist Labour Party. The British
    workers, whose leaders were intellectuals and who for decades were
    distinguished by their contempt for theory, are talking in quite
    definite tones; and the paper shows that the British workers are
    now taking an interest in the question of revolution, that there
    is a growing interest in the fight against revisionism,
    opportunism, and parliamentary socialism, the social-treachery we
    have got to know so well. This struggle is becoming an issue of
    the day. We can say quite definitely that our American Comrade R.,
    who has published a voluminous book containing a number of
    articles by Trotsky and myself, thus giving a summary of the
    history of the Russian revolution, was quite right when he said
    that the French Revolution was victorious on a world-wide scale,
    and that, if it was directly crushed, it was only because it was
    surrounded on the European continent by more backward countries,
    in which a movement of emulation, sympathy and support could not
    immediately arise. The Russian revolution, which, owing to the
    yoke of tsarism and a number of other factors (continuity with
    1905, etc.), started before the others, is surrounded by countries
    which are on a higher level of capitalist development and are
    approaching the revolution more slowly, but more surely, durably
    and firmly. We find that with every year, and even with every
    month, the number of supporters and friends of the Soviet Republic
    is increasing tenfold, a hundredfold, a thousandfold in every
    capitalist country; and it must be said that we have more friends
    and allies than we imagine!

The attempt of world imperialism to crush us by military force
    has collapsed completely. The international situation has now
    given us a much longer and more durable respite than the one we
    had at the beginning of the revolution. But we must remember that
    this is nothing more than a respite. We must remember that the
    whole capitalist world is armed to the teeth and is only waiting
    for the moment, choosing the best strategical conditions, and
    studying the means of attack. We must never under any
    circumstances forget that all the economic power and all the
    military power is still on its side. We are still weak on an
    international scale, but we are rapidly growing and gaining
    strength, wresting one weapon after another from the hands of the
    enemy. But the enemy is lurking in wait for the Soviet Republic at
    every step. International capital has definite designs, a
    calculated plan, now that the blockade has been removed, to unite,
    to fuse, to weld together international food speculation,
    international freedom of trade, with our own internal food
    speculation, and on the basis of this speculation to pave the way
    for a new war against us, to prepare a new series of traps and
    pitfalls.

And this brings us to that fundamental task which constituted
    the chief theme, the chief object of attention of our
    Congress. That is the task of development. In this respect the
    Congress has done a lot. A resolution has been unanimously adopted
    on the principal question, the question of economic development
    and transport. And now, by means of Party education, we shall be
    able to get this resolution carried into effect by the three
    million working-class members of the trade unions, acting as one
    man. We shall ensure that this resolution channels all our
    strength, discipline and energy to the restoration of the
    country’s economic life—first of all to the
    restoration of the railways, and then to the improvement of the
    food situation.

We have now quite a number of subjects for propaganda and every
    item of news we get from abroad and every new dozen members of the
    Party provide us with fresh material. Propaganda must be carried
    on systematically, without the dispersion and division of
    forces. We must bear firmly in mind that we achieved successes and
    performed miracles in the military sphere because we always
    concentrated on the main and fundamental thing, and solved
    problems in a way that capitalist society could not solve
    them. The point is that in capitalist society everything that
    particularly interests the citizens—their economic
    conditions, war and peace—is decided secretly, apart from
    society itself. The most important questions—war, peace,
    diplomatic questions—are decided by a small handful of
    capitalists, who deceive not only the masses, but very often
    parliament itself. No parliament in the world has ever said
    anything of weight on the question of war and peace. In capitalist
    society the major questions affecting the economic life of the
    working people—whether they are to live in starvation or in
    comfort—are decided by the capitalist—who is the lord,
    a god! In all capitalist countries, including the democratic
    republics, the attention of the people is diverted at such times
    by the corrupt bourgeois press, which wears the label of freedom
    of speech, and which will invent and circulate anything to fool
    and deceive the masses. In our country, on the other hand, the
    whole apparatus of state power, the whole attention of the
    class-conscious worker have been entirely and exclusively centred
    on the major and cardinal issue, on the chief task. We have made
    gigantic progress in this way in the military sphere, and we must
    now apply our experience to the economic sphere.

We are effecting the transition to socialism, and the most
    urgent question—bread and work—is not a private
    question, not the private affair of an employer, but the affair of
    the whole of society, and any peasant who thinks at all must
    definitely realise and understand that if the government raises
    the question of the railways in its whole press, in every article,
    in every newspaper issue, it is because it is the common affair of
    all. This work to develop the country will lead the peasant out of
    the blindness and ignorance that doomed him to slavery; it will
    lead him to real liberty, to a state of affairs in which the
    working folk will be aware of all the difficulties that confront
    them and will direct all the forces of public organisation, all
    the forces of the state apparatus, all the forces of agitation to
    the simplest and most essential things, rejecting all the tinsel
    and trimmings, all the playing at resolutions and the artful
    promises which form the subject of the newspaper agitation of all
    capitalist countries. All our forces, all our attention must be
    centred on these simple economic tasks, which are clear to every
    peasant, to which the middle, even the well-to-do, peasant, if he
    is at all honest, cannot object, and which we are always
    absolutely right in raising at every meeting. Even the masses of
    the least politically-conscious workers and peasants will confirm
    that the chief thing at the moment is to restore the economy in a
    way that will prevent it from falling again into the hands of the
    exploiters and will not offer the slightest indulgence to those
    who, having a surplus of grain in a starving country, use it to
    enrich themselves and to make the poor starve. You will not find a
    single man, however ignorant and unenlightened, who does not have
    the feeling that this is unjust, to whom the idea has not
    occurred, vague and unclear perhaps, that the arguments of the
    supporters of the Soviet government fully accord with the
    interests of the working people.

It is to these simple tasks, which in the big capitalist
    societies are kept in the background and are regarded as the
    private affair of the bosses, that we must direct the attention of
    the whole army of 600,000 Party members, among whom we must not
    tolerate a single one who does not do his duty; and for the sake
    of this we must get the whole mass of the workers to join us and
    to display the greatest self-sacrifice and devotion. It will be
    difficult to organise this, but since, from the point of view of
    the working people it is just, it has tremendous moral weight and
    immense power of conviction. And so, confident that, thanks to the
    work of the Congress, this task can now be accomplished as
    brilliantly as we accomplished the military task (although again
    at the price of a number of defeats and mistakes), we may say that
    the workers of all European and American countries are now looking
    towards us, looking with expectancy to see whether we shall
    accomplish the more difficult task confronting us—for it is
    more difficult than the achievement of military victory. It cannot
    be accomplished by enthusiasm, by self-sacrifice and heroic
    fervour alone. In this work of organisation, in which we Russians
    have been weaker than others in this work of self-discipline, in
    this work of rejecting the incidental and striving for the main
    thing, nothing can be done in a hurry. And in this sphere of
    requisitioning grain, repairing the railways, restoring the
    economy, where progress is made only inch by inch, where the
    ground is being prepared, and where what is being done is perhaps
    little, but is durable—in this work, the eyes of the workers
    of all countries are upon us, they expect new victories of us. I
    am convinced that, guided by the decisions of our Congress, with
    the 600,000 members of the Party working like one man, and
    establishing closer ties with the economic bodies and the trade
    union bodies, we shall accomplish this task as successfully as we
    accomplished the military task, and shall march swiftly and surely
    towards the victory of the World Socialist Soviet Republic!
    (Applause.)

[1]TheNinth Party Congresswas held in Moscow from March 29
    to April 5, 1920. The Congress opened in the Bolshoi Theatre with
    an introductory speech by Lenin. The following meetings of the
    Congress took place in one of the buildings of the
    Kremlin. Present at the Congress were 715 delegates, of whom 553
    had the right to vote and 162 were delegates with voice but no
    vote; they represented 611,973 Party members. At the Congress
    there were delegates from the Party organisations of Central
    Russia, the Ukraine, Urals Siberia and of other districts recently
    liberated by the Red Army. Many delegates came to the Congress
    straight from the front.

The Congress adopted the following agenda: (1)
    Report of the Central Committee; (2) Immediate tasks of economic
    development; (3) Trade union movement; (4) Organisational
    questions; (5) Tasks of the Communist International, (6) Attitude
    to the co-operatives; (7) Transition to the militia system; (8)
    Election to the Central Committee, (9) Other business.

Lenin guided the work of the Congress. He
    delivered the report on the political work of the Central
    Committee and closed the debate on the report. He also spoke on
    economic development and on co- operation, and made the speech on
    the closing of the Congress. He submitted a proposal on the list
    of candidates for membership to the C.C.

In its resolution “The Immediate Tasks
    of Economic Construction” the Congress pointed out that
    “the basic condition of economic rehabilitation of the
    country is steady implementation of the single economic plan for
    the coming historical epoch”.

The Ninth Congress directives were taken as
    the basis for a plan by the State Commission for the
    Electrification of Russia (GOELRO); the final draft of which was
    approved in December 1920 by the All-Russia Congress of
    Soviets. It was the first long-term scientific plan in history for
    the economic development of a vast country; it was calculated to
    create the production and technical basis of socialism.

Special attention was devoted to the
    organisation of production management. The resolution on the
    question pointed out the necessity of competent, firm and
    energetic one-man management.

The Congress emphasised the importance of
    utilising the achievements of science, technology and culture in
    the interests of socialist economy. The Congress put forward the
    task of enlisting specialists into the sphere of production and of
    establishing the atmosphere of comradely co-operation between
    workers and specialists.

The factional group of Democratic Centralists
    (Sapronov, Osinsky, V. Smirnov and others) opposed the Party line
    on economic development. Using phrases about democratic
    centralism, this group spoke against the use of specialists,
    against centralised state administration, against one-man
    management and the personal responsibility of managers of
    enterprise’s; they insisted on unlimited corporate
    management. That group was supported at the Congress by Rykov,
    Tomsky, Milyutin, and Lomov, who also spoke against the principle
    of one-man management and claimed that corporate management was
    the only principle of management of industry from the Supreme
    Economic Council down to the management of a single factory.

The Congress resolutely denounced the
    democratic centralism group and rejected their anti-Party
    proposals.

Another important question discussed at the
    Congress was that of trade unions in connection with the
    adaptation of their work for economic tasks. The Congress severely
    criticised syndicalist elements (Shlyapnikov, Lozovsky, Tomsky,
    Lutovinov), who advocated the “independence” of trade
    unions and counterposed them to the Communist Party and the Soviet
    power.   The Congress pointed out that the trade unions, as school
    of communism, should organise the proletarian masses, train them
    in the work of management, raise their cultural and political
    level to the standards of communism, and prepare them for the role
    of active builders of communism.

At its closed meeting on April 4, the
    Congress elected a new Central Committee of 19 members and 12
    alternate members. A .A. Andreyev, F. E. Dzerzhinsky,
    M. I. Kalinin, V. I. Lenin, Y. E. Rudzutak, F. A. Sergeyev
    (Artyom) were among the newly elected C.C. members.

[2]Lenin refers to the savage terror resorted to by the Finnish
    bourgeoisie to suppress the proletarian revolution in 1918. Over
    90,000 people were imprisoned or sent to concentration camps,
    nearly 18,000 were executed and nearly as many died of hunger or
    tortures. The number of victims of White Terror ten times exceeded
    the number of Finnish workers killed in the battles for the
    revolution.

[3]After the November revolution of 1918 in Germany the Right-wing
      leaders of German Social-Democracy exerted every effort to save
      the capitalist system. The Right Social-Democrats and the
      Independents seized the majority of seats in theArbeiterrätewhich had sprung up during the
      revolution, and at their First All-Germany Congress, held
      December 16-21, 1918, in Berlin, succeeded in carrying through a
      resolution on handing over power to a government representing
      the interests of the bourgeoisie and on convening a Constituent
      Assembly. This actually meant the end of theArbeiterräte.In January 1919
      counter-revolutionary detachments set up by the War Minister
      Noske, Right Social-Democrat, brutally suppressed the
      revolutionary action of the Berlin proletariat. On January 15,
      armed detachments arrested and brutally murdered the leaders of
      the German working class, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa
      Luxemburg. Having crushed the January uprising and destroyed the
      best leaders of the German working class, the German bourgeoisie
      ensured the victory of the bourgeois parties during the
      elections to the Constituent Assembly on January 19, 1919.

[4]The rout of the foreign interventionists and whiteguards in 1919
      and the consolidation of Soviet Russia’s position in the
      world compelled the bourgeois rulers of Latvia to seek a peace
      treaty with the R.S F.S.R. On March 25, 1920, the Ministry for
      Foreign Affairs of Latvia addressed a proposal to the Soviet
      Government to start peace negotiations. The peace conference of
      R.S.F.S.R. and Latvian representatives opened on April 16 in
      Moscow. The peace treaty was signed in Riga on August 11.

[5]By the beginning of 1920 Soviet Russia’s position at home
    and abroad had been consolidated, and the ruling circles of
    Finland had to conclude a peace treaty with the R.S.F.S.R. On
    March 25 the Ministry for Foreign Affairs of Finland proposed to
    the Soviet Government to demarcate the frontier that was
    tantamount to starting negotiations on peace. The peace treaty
    between the R.S.F.S.R. and Finland was signed on October 14, 1920
    in the town of Yuryev (now Tartu). It confirmed the independence
    and sovereignty of Finland granted her by the Soviet Government in
    1917.

[6]The Polish Government’s agreement to
    start negotiations was merely a manoeuvre to cover war
    preparations against the Soviet Republic. In reply to the Soviet
    Government’s many proposals (De-cember 22, 1919, January 28,
    February 2, March 6 1920), the Polish Government gave its consent
    only on March 2, 1920. But the Polish reactionaries sabotaged the
    negotiations and started hostilities on April 25, 1920. In the
    autumn of 1920, however, as a result of the Red Army’s
    offensive the Polish Government had to agree to sign a peace
    treaty. The Treaty on an Armistice and Preliminary Peace Terms was
    signed in Riga on October 12, and the Peace Treaty between the
    R.S.F.S.R. and the Ukrainian S.S.R. on the one side and Poland on
    the other was signed in Riga on March 18, 1921.

[7]Lenin refers to S. I. Gusev’s pamphlet “Immediate
    Problems of Economic Development (On C.C., R.C.P.[B.]
    Theses. Materials for the Ninth Party Congress, Saratov,
    1920)”. The paragraph referred to by Lenin was included in
    the draft resolution with slight alterations.

In Gusev’s pamphlet this point is worded
    as follows: “All enterprises which are not subsidiary to the
    chief economic task of the period should be developed to the
    extent that they do not interfere with the fulfilment of the main
    task. Subsidiary enterprises should be developed as required by
    the main task. In view of this a single economic plan should not
    be the sum total of production programmes worked out by individual
    industries and local economic councils on the basis of orders
    received from central and local organisations, but, on the
    contrary, such a plan should envisage the volume of production for
    each industry.

[8]Lenin refers to the meeting of the group of the All-Russia Central
    Council of Trade Unions on March 15, 1920, at which Tomsky’s
    theses on the “Tasks of the Trade Unions” were
    discussed. Lenin sharply criticised the theses, particularly
    article 7 on corporate management as the main method. But the
    All-Russia C.C.T.U. group took up an incorrect stand, and its
    majority voted for Tomsky’s theses.

[9]The Decree of the Council of People’s Commissars “On
    Centralisation of Management, Protection of Roads and Raising
    Their Traffic Capacity”, published inIzvestiaNo. 59, March 28, 1918, was demagogically called the “Decree
    on Dictatorship” by the Mensheviks and
    Socialist-Revolutionaries.

[10]The Ninth Congress of the R.C.P.(B.) set up a special committee to
    discuss the co-operative movement. At its meeting of April 2,
    1920, the committee examined several variants of the theses on the
    co-operatives submitted for discussion at the Congress. The
    committee took as the basis the theses by V. P. Milyutin, who
    proposed to subordinate co-operatives to the state. After
    Lenin’s speech against Milyutin’s theses, the Congress
    by a majority vote passed a resolution which Lenin had
    supported.